## Introducing iteration

The for operation is one of the most common, but also one of the most confusing, ways to tell a computer what to do. This is because it requires to understand a lot of concepts at once; we will walk through each of them, get confused a little bit, then get confused a lot, then get it.

When talking about for, we usually talk about for loops or iteration. This is because for lets you express the fact that you will perform an operation on a (finite) set of elements. Let’s start with a perfectly boring yet somewhat instructive example. We can draw five random numbers between 0 and 1, using

rand(5)


We might want to print smol when a number is lower or equal to 0.5, and chonky in the rest of the situations. In a lot of programming examples, you will see foo and bar. Why on Earth would we need to print foo and bar? These are nonsense words used as placeholders by programmers. Of course, what with us being all fancy, the term you should use instead of nonsense is “metasyntactic variables”. But polysyllabic nonsense is nonsense still, and so we will use the far more dignified smol and chonky:

random_numbers = rand(5)

for random_number in random_numbers
if random_number ≤ 0.5
println("smol")
else
println("chonky")
end
end

smol
smol
smol
chonky
chonky


There is quite a lot happening here, so we will go line by line.

random_numbers = rand(5)


First, we generate 5 random numbers, and put them in a variable called random_numbers. It is always a good idea to give very explicit names to variables. To begin with, most code editors will be very good at autocompletion: type a few letters, then hit the Tab key, and you will see the possible values.

Giving plural names to things that have multiple elements is also useful: it helps to have code that reads like plain english. By contrast, variables whose name is singular have a single value in them.

Now we can start the loop itself:

for random_number in random_numbers
# Content of the loop
end


This line gives a simple instruction to your computer. Actually, no. It gives a bunch of complex instructions to your computer, but it is an easy enough instruction for us to write, and this is all that matters.

It goes something like this:

1. look at what is inside random_numbers
2. take the first value, and name it random_number
3. do whatever we tell you to do with this variable until you hit end
4. move on to the next value of random_numbers, and start again
5. when you have exhausted the values in random_numbers, continue to whatever is after the end of the loop

The for loop is one of the most difficult construct to understand, because of this “change the content of the variable” trickery. We will have a few more examples in this lesson.

The final lines we need to look at are in the inside of the loop – we call this inside thing the body for no particular reason.

if random_number ≤ 0.5
println("smol")
else
println("chonky")
end


These lines should be familiar to you now – your computer will evaluate the statement “random_number is lower than or equal to 0.5”, and depending on the truthiness of it, will print either foo or bar.

# We don't get tired, we get even.

Let’s practice with an exercice. We want to print all numbers between 1 and 12 that are even. Julia has an iseven function to do this, and we will get you started with a block of code that is only missing a few instruction – complete it to solve the problem!

numbers = collect(1:12)

for ___ in numbers
if ___
println(___)
end
end


Before we move on to a more interesting use of iteration, it is worth understanding what exactly is in the random_numbers object. Let’s display it again:

random_numbers

5-element Array{Float64,1}:
0.22113690721796142
0.06716702654620077
0.03654155513366297
0.5301541090143516
0.7670885403859855


This type of object is an array; it may help to think of an array as a shelf, in which every compartment can store one thing. You can have shelves with a single row, a single column, or both rows and columns. In Julia, arrays are by default columns, and this is important for applications like linear algebra (they behave as vectors). Arrays have all sorts of properties, the most important being their length:

length(random_numbers)

5


This tells us that our “shelf” has five compartments, so we can store five things in it. We can also ask what its size is:

size(random_numbers)

(5,)


The output is (5,) - this is the computer way of telling us that this array has 5 positions in its first dimension, and no positions in its second dimension: this is a column with five rows. We can also access any position we like; this is akin to asking “computer, give me the content of the 1st compartment”:

random_numbers[1]

0.22113690721796142


Some languages, like Julia, R, and MatLab, start counting from 1, but python and C start counting from 0. These are conventions that each language adopted. Everyone thinks the other camp is wrong, and it’s one of these surprisingly bitter (considering how utterly unimportant they are) divides in the computer science world.

We can *also ask what the last position contains:

random_numbers[length(random_numbers)]

0.7670885403859855


The way to read this instruction is as follows: get me the element at position length(random_numbers). We know that the length of random_numbers is 5, so this will return the 5th position. Julia has a quite pretty way of getting the last element of most collections:

random_numbers[end]

0.7670885403859855


An extra bit of syntactic sugar in Julia are the two following functions:

first(random_numbers)

0.22113690721796142

last(random_numbers)

0.7670885403859855


Being able to access elements by their position can be very useful. Our random_numbers array has five elements, and we only want to print the odd-numbered ones. One way to do this would be to call then individually:

println(random_numbers[1])
println(random_numbers[3])
println(random_numbers[5])

0.22113690721796142
0.03654155513366297
0.7670885403859855


Of course, this is only reasonable if we have a very small number of things to do. But what if we want to iterate over hundreds, or thousands of values? We need a more efficient strategy.

## Iterating over values

We know that a number is even if the statement x % 2 == 0, where % is integer division. We can also say that a number is even if the remainder of its integer division by two is not 0: x % 2 != 0.

Let’s go:

for i in eachindex(random_numbers)
if i % 2 != 0
println("Position $i:\t", random_numbers[i]) end end  Position 1: 0.22113690721796142 Position 3: 0.03654155513366297 Position 5: 0.7670885403859855  We can “read” this snippet (a snippet is the affectionate name given to a litle chunk of code; a chunk is a much uglier name for “a piece”) as there is a variable i it will take every value between 1 and the length of the ranom_numbers array for every value look if it is odd if it is, print the random number at this position  The eachindex function is a very powerful way to get, well, every position in an array; it is the same thing as writing for i in 1:length(random_numbers), but in a more expressive way. All for loops will share the following structure: for element in collection # this bit can be as complex as we like -- but not too complex! do_things(element) end  There is an important notion to mention: the scope. The scope is the parts of your program in which a variable exists. Let’s look at this hypothetical code: for i in 1:3 println(i) end  It will take the values 1, 2, and 3, and put them in the variable i, one at a time. This is like writing i = 1 i = 2 i = 3  Right? So let’s try. What do you think will happen if you run the cell below? for i in 1:3 println(i) end println(i)  1 2 3 Error: UndefVarError: i not defined  What happens is that the variable i only exists within the for loop! This might seem problematic at first, but it is actually much cleaner: this avoid polluting your workspace with a lot of variables that are not really relevant. This is true for all variables created within a loop. In the following code, a is not defined outside of the loop: for i in 1:3 a = i end  If you want a variable to be accessible outside a loop, you can simply create it before and declare it as a global variable (this is not required within functions, and this is the point where reading the section of the Julia manual on scope will help you): a = 0 for i in 1:3 global a a = i end println(a)  3  ## Doing something until something happens Before moving on, there is an additional construct we can use: while. This one is dangerous (or at the very least possibly inconvenient), because it will keep on running until something happens. Why is not called until? Because most programming languages have been designed with little regard for the way humans think… A good example of while in action is to keep on generating random numbers until their mean is within a certain range of a desired value. The rand() function will generate numbers uniformly distributed between 0 and 1, so we can run it for a while (GET IT?) to get a sample with an average of about 0.5. We can for example write it this way: using Statistics # We need this to use mean my_collection = rand(5) while !(0.499 ≤ mean(my_collection) ≤ 0.501) append!(my_collection, rand(5)) end println("μ:$(round(mean(my_collection); digits=4))")

μ: 0.5008


The instruction just after while, i.e.

!(0.499 ≤ mean(my_collection) ≤ 0.501)


is worth thinking about. It is a very compact way of running multiple tests at once: the mean needs to be larger than 0.499, yet smaller than 0.501, and we need to continue until this is true (but there is not until statement, so we use the awkward “while not”).

If we are particularly unlucky, we would never get a sequence of random numbers that would match this condition! In this case, our computer would stubbornly keep running until the heat death of the universe (or until it breaks, which in all likelihood will happen earlier). Writing while loops can be a complex exercice, and it is always good to think about “exit strategies”. These will be discussed in the “Advanced control flow” primer.

This concludes the lesson on the flow of execution. These concepts are very important to understand in depth, as everything else we do is built on them. Now would be a good time to get back to the questions, or to try and change the examples, to make sure you are familiar with the material.

# Generating a diverse enough sample of numbers.

For this question, we want to take the k first numbers from a series of random numbers, so that the difference between the largest and the smallest is at least some arbitrary threshold. By looking at the documentation for the extrema function, and by remembering what the first and last functions do, complete the following code:

numbers = rand(10000);
threshold = 0.5

for k in ___(numbers)
series = ___[1:k]
extremas = ___(___)
if (___(___) - ___(___)) ≥ threshold
println(___)
break
end
end


The break keyword is here to stop our loop when we have found the correct value of k.